As I stated in the last post, I am going to talk about the evolution of the level editor in Emerald.
The editor used to be a very text heavy editor; there were visuals but very glitchy. Sometimes the walls were look liked they covered the whole screen in the editor, but in the game it looked fine. There was no background or theme to the editor as well. As you added to vehicles and streams (well, I guess back then it used to be called ‘river’, but now it’s called stream), you could only see the current one you were working on and not ones that you already put down. So you need to do some coordinate geometry before you started to edit your level. You couldn’t visually see how fast an object was moving; it was just a bunch of numbers.
The controls weren’t user-friendly at all. You needed to know the extra controls beforehand, as they were not all shown on the screen. If you didn’t know what you were going to make or what you were doing in general you would feel lost. But the editor still worked and I was able to create levels with it. In fact, the first few screenshots of the game were all made in this editor.
Then I rebuilt the editor; it was an improvement in many ways. This happened shortly after the Restored post. I made an effort to make it more visual. I put in a better graphical interface, so you can see what was being putdown and what you have already placed. This allowed you to build without prior work as you would be building off of what is already there. Of course there was the option of placing objects in specific places on the map if you knew what you wanted to make.
You could see how fast an object is going in comparison to other objects. It had the same structure as the original: a player had to add one of every feature to one level, even if he or she didn’t want to. This was a problem because what if you wanted to make a level filled with tons of cars and nothing else? Well you couldn’t… But the editor itself was a huge improvement over the last one. I used this editor up until the I introduced the new editor.
The most recent update to the editor is a vast improvement over the others. It is a visual editor, where the game’s graphics and engine are inside the editor. I started to create this one because in order to previously make a level bigger you had to basically guess where you were placing an object outside of the screens boundaries (unless you used coordinates, but that can become tiresome). The controls are the same from the previous editor, which was more intuitive than the first one. The downfall to this style of editor is that a player can’t see the position of an object or the name of the level or the speed of the object numerically…yet. I will be adding that in later, but for now I want to make sure the editor does as it was meant to do: Edit.
So that’s a brief history of how the level editor has changed; it has grown a lot over the past year. But there are still more things I am going to put in the editor. I want the editor to be powerful enough to fuel your imagination and so you can truly make fantastic levels.
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